Peter Travers

In this shivery ghost story, director-editor-DP Steven Soderbergh proves a rich imagination can work wonders on a low budget and turn the familiar into something fresh and frightening.

I, Tonya is funny as hell, but the pain is just as real. You'll laugh till it hurts.

An absolute stunner of a movie.

Nunez finds a striking lyricism in simple lives that inspires an uncommonly fine cast and ranks him as a world-class filmmaker.

It's a haunting, hypnotic film that exerts an escalating grip on the heart and the conscience.

By stooping low without selling out, this babes-and-bullets tour de force gets you high on movies again.

By the end of the film, the cliché of everybody getting along is reduced to both sides working together in the ultimate monument to capitalism: a mall. Some message.

Engrave an Oscar for actor-director Bradley Cooper for his heart-full-to-bursting tour de force as composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. Alive with glorious music, the film soars on the undying love the bisexual legend feels for the wife (a never-better Carey Mulligan) who lives with his angels and demons.

In the most purely pleasurable movie so far this year, Ryan Gosling has a blast as a science guy who rockets into space to save all our asses with jolts, jokes and smarts that won’t quit.

Relic marks an auspicious debut for Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James, who wants her slow-building thriller to seep into your bones rather than pound you with cheap scares.

Nunez is a major filmmaker who thrives working in a minor key. He makes Ruby a romantic fable with a tough core of intelligence and wit. It’s a real beauty.

If you're thinking "yuck," you're right. I added the extra star for Zooey Deschanel, who is so delicious as his honey that you want not to say no to Yes Man.

Here's Spike Lee at his ballsiest. Who else would take Aristophanes' Lysistrata, set in ancient Greece, and prop it up in present-day Englewood, Chicago, where violence is so prevalent the locals call it Chi-Raq, a mash-up of "Chicago" and "Iraq."

Dive head first into this pulpy, erotic crime thriller starring a fireball Kristen Stewart as a gym manager in hot love with a young bodybuilder (a sensational Katy M. O'Brian), Directed in a fever by the great Rose Glass, the film is a grenade of image and sound ready to blow.

Coppola is a virtuoso of image and sound. but don't mistake her delicate touch for weakness. The Beguiled is a hothouse flower of startling power and intimacy. You can't shake it.

Clermont-Tonnerre comes from a place of defiance, and her fearless instincts surge through every frame. Each time you think you have this movie pegged, it’ll knock you for a loop.

Wilson is flat-out hilarious, playing this cowboy like a surfer dude zapped back in time.

Robbins’s debut as a director is exceptionally accomplished. He shrewdly balances his sense of purpose with a flair for mischief.

It's Dench, showing how faith and hellraising can reside in the same woman, who makes Philomena moving and memorable.

Funny, touching and acutely observed film.

What sounds like undiluted melodrama with the hounds forever nipping at Ewa's heels is transformed by Gray into a mesmerizing meditation on the broken American promise.

Sam Peckinpah lives! The rampaging spirit of the late filmmaker, known as Bloody Sam for films such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," is all over this blistering modern Western from first-time director Tommy Lee Jones.

August keeps a discreet distance from the harsher realities, making The Best Intentions must viewing only if you find diluted Bergman better than no Bergman at all.

It's a hardcore masterpiece that digs into our violent past to hold up a dark mirror to the systemic racism that still rages in the here and now.

Shot with a surrealist's eye for madness and destruction by the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Mother! always seems on the verge of exploding. Your head will feel the same way. And I mean that as a compliment.

If Jackman and Stewart are serious about this being their mutual X-Men swan song, they could not have crafted a more heartfelt valedictory.

These melancholy Danes create something sweetly sexy, funny and touching.

Aims for pure joy and achieves it.

In between scenes of the muscleheads torturing their victim, Bay indulges his taste for treating women as sluts and grisly brutality as a nifty excuse for a cheap laugh. Pain and Gain is personal all right. You leave these characters with the distinct impression that they're Bay's kind of people.

Of course, such Sixties films as Goodbye, Columbus and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice have trampled over similar terrain. But few can boast Roemer’s light touch, brisk pacing and anarchic comic spirit. The passing of time has given The Plot Against Harry a lost-and-found quality that is both innocent and seductive.

Close plays this ignored, pushed-aside woman like a gathering storm, drawing us into the mind and heart of a heroine who’s not going to take it any more. The actress has received six acting nominations without ever winning an Oscar. The Wife, a funny and fierce showcase for her prodigious talents, might just end the drought. You can’t take your eyes off her.

It's thrilling, a soaring blend of 3D animation and spectacular storytelling that swerves daringly to honor the healing chaos of family, human and dragon.

The film is just two people talking, but director Jim Simpson finds its grieving heart.

Even with sex, drugs, hip-hop and a murder, these four stories are dull, dull, dull, dull.

As a director, Franco succeeds beautifully at bringing coherence to chaos, a word that accurately describes the making of this modern midnight-movie phenomenon. Do you need to see "The Room" to appreciate The Disaster Artist? Not really.

Cruz exudes a sensual aura of mystery that holds you spellbound. And Almodóvar, a true poet of cinema, creates images -- horrifying and healing -- that live inside your head like a waking dream. You want to miss a movie like that? I didn’t think so.

You won't forget this film -- it's devastating.

In this compassionate comedy of missed connections, Jarmusch makes us see the ordinary in fresh, pertinent and provocative ways. And the cumulative power of his vision is undeniable.

Blue Caprice is a cinematic punch to the gut, a mind-bending meditation on how to mold a killer, and one of the most potent and provocative true-crime movies ever made.

Without pushing or showing off, Miller creates a breezy comedy that pulls you up short. Buoyed by faultless actors who mesh beautifully, Maggie's Plan tickles you with laughs that can — suddenly or even days later — choke you up with emotion.

Adventureland throws a lot at us, but not enough of it sticks.

A thrilling combination of documentary and musical dazzler.

Harington and Vikander provide the spark the film needs to get us through the tribulations and tragedies that pile on with numbing regularity. You leave Testament of Youth feeling some of the impact that Brittain’s book must have had at the time.

Even when Oldroyd loses his directorial grip, Pugh is there to make things right. Not many young actress have that sort of power to command the screen as if by divine right. She dives deep into this terrifically twisted, erotic thriller and makes it matter.

The suspense crackles, the acting sizzles and the script, by promising first-timer Russell Gewirtz, keeps tossing surprises like grenades.

Though the formulaic result comes up short as cinema, it’ll make you laugh you ass off. There are worse trade-offs.

Hardwicke whips up a frenzy of crazy-cool board action, with Alva choreographing the stunts. Even when the slippery-slope-of-success cliches halt the film's momentum, the ready-to-rock actors rev it up again.

Guardians of the Galaxy does the impossible. Through dazzle and dumb luck, it turns the clichés of comic-book films on their idiot heads and hits you like an exhilarating blast of fun-fun-fun. It's insanely, shamelessly silly – just one reason to love it.

Quentin Tarantino puts his two “Kill Bill” epics together to make one uncut, unrated radically untamed film with extras and Uma unleashed that great godalmighty feels free at last.

A ravishing, romantic lark brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit.

A mesmerizing film spinning from hilarity to heartbreak.

An emotional wipeout.

A bright burst of action and comedy with a cast that makes for rousing good company.

To call it trippy would be an understatement. Your head might explode. Just don't accuse Taymor of playing it safe.

Maybe this redo didn’t need so many bells and whistles, but Mangold brings it home.

Fukunaga, son of a Japanese father and a Swedish mother, is a filmmaker to watch. He has reanimated a classic for a new generation, letting Jane Eyre resonate with terror and tenderness.

Duncan zips through five decades and dozens of characters without reducing the participants to cliches or slogans. A remarkable cast helps him to keep focused on the core of the piece.

Evocative, mysterious and shot through with bruising humor and heartbreak, A Monster Calls gets you where you live and where there's no place to hide. There's magic in it.

It's probably the movie event of the summer if you're an eight-year-old girl who doesn't get out much.

Blast of fright and fun.

Priyanka Chopra-Jonas lends her beauty and star power to Ramin Bahrani’s unwieldy but enthralling screen adaptation of Aravind Adiga's bestselling novel about the haves and have-nots in modern India.

Takes off with the lightning speed of a thriller, the gonzo force of frontline journalism and the emotional wallop of a drama that puts a human face on shocking statistics.

A sexy tennis bum (Sam Riley) and a married woman (Stacy Martin) meet at a luxury resort and stir up murderous thoughts in a too cryptic thriller from German director Jan-Ole Gerster that recalls Hitchcock and Antonioni while revealing a tormented mind of its own.

This baby dazzles like nothing else anywhere.

Oscar weekend is the perfect time to catch up with Edward Berger’s anti-war epic about young German soldiers dying in the trenches during WW1. The German-language film earned a wowza nine nominations, including Best Picture, and tragically its message never gets old.

You might bitch that Flight levels off after its shocking, soaring start. But you'd be missing the point of an exceptional entertainment that Zemeckis shades into something quietly devastating – not an addiction drama, but the deeper spectacle of a man facing the truth about himself.

Before it goes off the rails in the final stretch, 99 Homes is a riveting rabble-rouser that thinks it can make a difference. In these days when Hollywood typically dulls our wits, Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes has a fire in its belly. It's spoiling to be heard.

The fall awards season roars in with this cinema powder keg. Expect Oscar to sprinkle gold dust on writer-director Aaron Sorkin and a gangbusters cast for making this recreation of a notorious 1969 trial burn with a timely relevance that singes the screen.

Blending the hilarious and heartfelt, the tough and the tender, John Carney’s sweerheart of an Irish musical is something you’ll want to hold close.

Mixing comedy and corn with surprising savvy, Dave is the first political fable of the Clinton era. It’s a winner.

This you-are-there spellbinder is a master director shining his light on the best rock band on the planet.

Nothing the Hughes brothers have done in their videos for Tone Loc, Tupac Shakur and others prepares you for the controlled intensity and maturity they bring to their stunning feature debut.

One of the year's best and most provocative films.

Bruckner is an amazement, piercing the heart without begging for sympathy. This small gem of a movie is the perfect setting for her breakthrough performance.

An emotional powerhouse.

Jennifer Lopez and all the mothers out there deserve better than this gross, cringey gorefest about a military-trained assassin (JLo) who makes up to the pre-teen daughter she gave up at birth by instructing her in the fine art of killing bad guys. Happy Mother’s Day, indeed.

Go with it. Let Nichols turn your head around. He sure as hell will. One caveat: Nichols drops you into the action, no backstory road map. What you see is what you get. Luckily, what you get is extraordinary.

Take a look at leading man Wagner Moura. That’s a movie star, right there. An Oscar nomination for this political thriller that truly thrills is his next step. Just watch, it’ll happen.

The film itself, energetically directed and written by Michael Hoffman, can't always rise to the level of its two dynamo stars.

It's hellish good fun. Stevens is mesmerizing as the avenger, helping director Adam Wingard turn The Guest into a blast of wicked mirth and malice.

Margin Call is an explosive drama that speaks lucidly and scarily to the times we live in.

In his third feature, following 2009's "Impolex" and 2011's "The Color Wheel," Perry, 30, offers a stinging portrait of writing as one of the bleeding arts. And he's bloody funny about it in the bargain.

George has been criticized for simplifying a complex story into an African "Schindler's List." But despite flaws in execution, this is a film of rare courage and imperishable heart.

Sergio is not a film about a saint or a sinner, but an attempt that succeeds more often than not to create a portrait of a man in full. Yes, it also occasionally puts him on a pedestal — but in these dark days, advocating for hope and idealism feels exactly right.

Can a brainwashed boy in Hitler Youth learn to stop worrying and love being a Nazi hater? Beautifully directed by Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin, this unexpectedly tender mesmerizer has an answer you won’t see coming

The stellar Adam Scott stars in an Irish horrorfest from Damien McCarthy, a visionary new talent who really knows how to scare the hell out of and into you.

The star is unstoppable and spectacular to see in motion. Watch her fly.

A different kind of love story: an honest one that takes a piece out of you.

Performance artist Miranda July hits a grand slam as the writer, director and star of her first film. It's a moonbeam romance laced with startling wit and gravity.

Kristen Stewart is so good as Princes Diana—it’s the performance of her life—that the Academy should start engraving her name on the Best Actress Oscar.

Scott and Davis could not be better. You're in for something special.

You could gripe about the excess of carnage and lack of philosophical substance. But surviving nature is Iñárritu's subject, and he delivers with magisterial brilliance.

Set in 1954 Detroit, Soderbergh’s terrific, twisty, film-noir throwback keeps a lot of racial, political and sexual tension simmering under the surface, providing a field day for actors who interact with clockwork precision and off-the-wall laughs.

Based on the bestseller by Bauman and Bret Witter and blessed with a nuanced script by John Pollono, the film makes sure that tears, when they come, are fully earned.

Beach and Adams give remarkable performances that grow in feeling and intensity.

The massacre of the Israel team at the 1972 Munich Olympics becomes an absolutely riveting docudrama on journalistic ethics as seen entirely through the control room of ABC Sports doing live coverage. Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro and Leonie Benesch will pin you to your seat.

As the director puts it: “This movie is an accumulation of scenes based on Van Gogh’s letters, common agreement about events in his life that parade as facts, hearsay and scenes that are just plain invented. This is not a forensic biography about the painter. It is about what it is to be an artist.”

Obvious Child is a romcom with a sting in its tail. And Slate is a dynamo, nailing every laugh while showing a true actor's gift for nuance.

Director Richard Eyre has struck gold. Twice. Dench and Winslet are a riveting matchup.

A stimulating detective story that holds you in thrall.

Doug Liman’s gimmicky dud about a London diamond heist set during the pandemic falsely assumes that quarantined audiences are panting to see films about the hell of living in quarantine. Despite a starry cast led by Anne Hathaway, Locked Down is a major letdown.

Nil By Mouth is a shockingly intimate portrait of entrapment that may leave you wincing. It’s Oldman’s Raging Bull.

As the hard-driving daddy of Venus and Serena Williams, Will Smith gives the performance of his life in an unapologetic crowd-pleaser. You just may want to stand up and cheer.

All praise to Elisabeth Moss, who brilliantly plays Jackson as a volcano on the verge of eruption, and director Josephine Decker, whose experimental "Madeline’s Madeline" reveled in leaving folks in a twist.

Blunt honesty and rare introspection sets Howard apart from the usual cut-and-paste trips down memory lane.

Here's a vampire movie for people who don’t like vampire movies. What We Do in the Shadows is packed with laughs, almost all of them are intentional.

10 Cloverfield Lane comes loaded with everything a psychological thriller needs to shatter your nerves — and then kicks it up a notch.

The actors give it their all, especially Knightley, whose jaw- jutting, heavily accented and unfairly criticized portrayal gives the film its fighting spirit.

Nicole Kidman is just astonishing in Rabbit Hole - subtle, fierce, brutally funny, tender when you least expect it, and battered by the feelings that hit her when she forgets to duck.

The last days of guilt-free glitz had consequences for more than two white chicks and their boyfriends, and Stillman shows how with delicious malice and unexpected compassion.

Even when the film fails her, Field never loses her focus.

Call it the black "Scarface" or "the Harlem Godfather" or just one hell of an exciting movie.

A delicate gem.

Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift.

Reiner gets lucky with his two stars. Wilson has charm to spare, and Hudson brings humor and sexiness to playing Emma and four au pair girls from different countries. But even they can't float a balloon with lead in it.

In the hands of Nichols, Mud emerges as a thing of bruised beauty. There's magic in it.

Nightcrawler curves and hisses its way into your head with demonic skill. When the laughs come, they stick in your throat. This is a deliciously twisted piece of work. And Gyllenhaal, coiled and ready to spring, is scarily brilliant. He truly is a monster for our time.

A fierce and feeling Viola Davis headlines this historical epic about women warriors in 1823 West Africa and reminds us how indelible and truly inspiring it is to see these brave sisters doing it for themselves.

Polarizing? Sure. But Wes Anderson is a film artist like no other. In defiance of realism, he builds dazzling, minimalist, all-star jewel boxes that are easy to spoof but impossible to equal. This Atomic-age fable about teen space nerds and their parents tinges laughs with genuine feeling.

Pop-culture escapism can be thrilling when dished out by experts. Katniss is a character worth a handful of sequels. And Lawrence lights up the screen. You'll follow her anywhere.

Shopworn propaganda.

Ayoade, the British comic making a remarkable feature debut with his adaptation of Joe Dunthorne's 2008 novel, blends mirth and malice with deadpan brilliance.

You don’t need to know a thing about Jean Luc Godard’s 'Breathless' and the New Wave to accept Richard Linklater’s invitation to participate in the sweet agony and ecstasy of their creation. No true movie lover would dream of missing it.

Under the keen-eyed direction of Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club), Wild emerges as an exciting, elemental adventure that takes you places you don't see coming.

It helps that the fun doesn't stop. It helps even more that the pitch-perfect script doesn’t step out of character for a joke.

It’s the essential conflict between mother and daughter that brings The Truth into Kore-eda territory, where life is always a delicate balance. He’s lucky to have Deneuve and Binoche tempering the verbal fireworks with a tenderness that that allows for pain, regret and the hard-won knowledge that they must both face the truth to move on.

If there were an ounce of taste left in Hollywood, the magnificent Vera Farmiga would be a front-runner for the Best Actress Oscar.

The talented Mr. Minghella has made an imperfect movie but not an impersonal one. His morality tale means to get under the skin, and does.

This riveting film is marred by compromises -- such as a switch of assassins to create an unpersuasive upbeat ending -- that keep it in the shadow of its predecessor.

A meandering but altogether mesmerizing film from writer-director Azazel Jacobs that finds buoyant comedy and touching gravity in the ashes of a relationship.

It’s a promising premise—a nerdy CIA decoder (Rami Malek) turns unlikely action hero when his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered by terrorists—but the movie promises more than it delivers in terms of suspense, escalating tension and a reason for being.

I kept smiling watching this fractured family drama. A bizarre reaction for an Icelandic movie about the end of a marriage. But it’s the high spirits that stay with you in Hlynur Pálmason's charmer about the intangibles of love.

The film’s genius is the way it applies the lessons of Sound City to any job. “The human element,” says Grohl, “that’s what makes the magic.” In his directing debut, Grohl shows the instincts of a real filmmaker. Sound City hits you like a shot in the heart.

See this darkly comic character study unburdened by preconceptions.

This dynamite thriller shivers with suspense. So if you ignore The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) because it's in Swedish with English subtitles, you probably deserve the remake Hollywood will surely screw up.

This PG-rated movie feels safe and constricted in a way the story never does on the page. It leaves out the deep magic of a good movie, or a good sermon: the feeling that something vital is at stake.

Aside from Alyosha, there's no one to root for here, and Zvyagintsev paints the bleakest of picture. But his filmmaking has a driving force that hurtles you along, and like his 2014 masterpiece "Leviathan," this micro-focused drama allows the director to turn the story of one family into an X-ray of a nation's bruised soul.

A spellbinder that features Richard Gere in one of his best performances ever.

In uniting to honor Arenas, Bardem and Schnabel create something extraordinary.

Whatever juice is left in the "Cop" franchise or in the once unstoppable career of Eddie Murphy peters out ignominiously in this poor excuse for a sequel.

The shopworn script by Pablo F. Fenjves, who ghost-wrote the unpublished O.J. Simpson book, If I Did It: The Confessions of the Killer, gets no help from director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil).

You may want to revisit this profanely hilarious Hollywood satire. . .just to catch the zingers the audience often drowns out with laughter. Hollywood corrupts absolutely, and Mamet turns the toxic process into the year's best and smartest comedy.

Gerwig is the mistress of all things funny and fierce, and her byplay with Kirke (Gone Girl) is killer. You won't know what hit you.

Rango is like nothing you've ever seen.

You're in for something funny, touching and vital. Director Lenny Abrahamson knows his way around eccentrics; just see "Adam & Paul" or "Garage" or "What Richard Did." And he makes an ideal guide into a bizarro world where music is made on the margins.

The art that The Kindergarten Teacher is scanning can be found in Gyllenhaal’s eyes, hungry for a life of the mind and one starved of meaning. Jimmy is not the only one who has something to say. For the filmmaker and her star, this movie is their poem.

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal are hotties with talent. And they maneuver through the daunting maze of shifting tones and intersecting plots of Love and Other Drugs like the pros they are.

This movie will get under your skin.

Disney's spirited re-telling of Rapunzel in 3D animation turns out to be a dazzler.

Ruben Brandt, Collector is always a feast for the eyes, but it’s the intellectual curiosity on display that raises the bar.

Instead of following biopic blueprints, Hawke directs Blaze like a Foley song: artful, all over the place and possessed of enough blunt truth and aching tenderness to pull you up short.

The sorrow inherent in this tale would be unbearable without the film’s flashes of humor and performances by a cast of nonprofessionals that are moving beyond measure. Capernaum suffers from being overly long and chaotic in structure, but there’s no mistaking its cumulative effect as an emotional powerhouse.

It's Olsen, as a damaged soul clinging to shifting ground, who makes this spellbinder impossible to shake.

No judgments here if you just want to hang back and let nonstop gore, gunfire, and explosions numb you into submission. Take that, COVID-19.

Still, the moments that hit hardest concern Leo’s relationship with Ahd (a very fine Eric Bernard), another male hustler who claims he’s only “gay 4 pay.”

Forget the silly title. There’s a world of hurt behind the laughs in this emotional powerhouse as therapist Morgan Freemen treats a PTSD soldier (a very fine Sonequa Martin-Green), home from Afghanistan but still talking to the scrappy ghost of her army bestie (Natalie Morales).

In this painfully funny and touching look at the vanities and insecurities that a mother (Brenda Blethyn) can pass on to her daughters in the name of love, writer-director Nicole Holofcener ("Walking and Talking") does a chick flick right.

If you're looking to have your nerves fried and your pulse pounded, this is your ticket to ride.

Kudos to Coogan and Reilly, not just for their gifts of impersonation, but for detailing the bedrock connection at work and play between the two men.

It's hot, fierce, funny, vicious and ready to bite, baby.

DiCaprio's swaggering, swinging-dick performance is the wildest damn thing he's ever put onscreen.

Jammed with story threads that don’t cohere, Cirque commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It’s bloodless.

Want to see a master class in acting? Watch Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins show how it’s done in The Two Popes, a fiercely moving and surprisingly funny provocation that pivots on speculative conversations between the German John Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins), and Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pryce), the future Pope Francis.

This movie wins you over, head and heart, without cheating. It's just about perfect.

This Thor sequel is way funnier than any movie subtitled The Dark World has a right to be (thanks, Hiddleston). And the blowout climax pitting Thor against Malekith and the elves is excitingly staged. It's just that waiting for the good stuff can be a real mood-killer.

McTeer and Brown make magic ina film that is wonderfully funny, touching and vital.

Taut, tense and enthralling, as smart and surprising as it protagonist.

Paradis sizzles in a star-making role that gleams like one of Gabor's blades. She's a spellbinder.

With this last entry, we have officially hit the bottom of the barrel. Whips, chains, butt plugs and nipple clips are nothing compared to the sheer torture of watching this movie.

The Crucible, despite some damaging cuts to the text, is a seductively exciting film that crackles with visual energy, passionate provocation and incendiary acting.

The endlessly inventive Wes Anderson and a cast of all-stars use all the tools of cinema to give a big, fat, loving smooch to, of all things, print journalism and the gifted eccentrics who practice it. Too fussy? Maybe. But what an exuberant gift of a memory piece.

Fulton and Pepe have created an extraordinary document. Hilarious and heartbreaking.

Throbs with action, suspense and a seductive rhythm all its own.

No use trying to describe Bernie. It's a one-of-a-kind inspiration. You will never feel closer to a convicted killer.

Kristen Wiig is an indisputable goddess of comedy. And this rowdy fem-friendship movie she stars in and wrote with Annie Mumolo is infused with the Wiig brand of wicked mischief.

Davis gives an absolutely electrifying performance that lends the movie a kick of outrageous originality. This Canadian actress, so good in Halt and Catch Fire and one of the best episodes ever of Black Mirror ("San Junipero") takes it to the next level, suggesting even more exciting things to come.

The film belongs to Blanchett -- this hellcat Virgin Queen is something to see.

The Muppets slaps a smile on your face you won't want to wipe off.

Gere, who has shockingly never been nominated for an Oscar, gives the performance of his career, intuitive and indelible.

Gary Oldman is one of the greatest actors on the planet – and he proves it again as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.

Gore keeps us riveted by being charming, literate and profoundly persuasive on a topic that's scarier than anything in a dozen Japanese horror flicks. Vote Gore on this one.

Gilliam, along with the gifted cinematographer Roger Pratt and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft, fashions a disturbing and dazzling lost world.

The movie is thunderously exciting, but what makes it resonate is the wrenching story we read on Damon's face. We've waited all summer for a wild ride to grab us with more than jolts. Now it's here. Hang on.

For three years, the camera focuses on the Chicks as wives, mothers, entertainers and political flash points. Their fight to stay uncompromised is inspiring.

Not since Julie Andrews rode an umbrella to glory in Mary Poppins has Disney given us such a real-life doll (Amy Adams).

Kitano is a riveting spectacle. So's the movie.

Shrek 2 may be computer-generated, but its innate heart and glorious sense of mischief make it one of the best and most humane movies of the summer.

Immensely entertaining and provocative.

It looks the same, moves the same and sounds the same (those Alan Menken songs!) as the original. But some of the magic has gone M.I.A.

All the actors come up aces. And let's bottle the delicious byplay between McCarthy and Byrne, whose comic timing is bitchy perfection.

What makes the film distinctive, devastating and unforget-table is the way De Palma lets the actions of the characters speak volumes. There is no conflict between what De Palma and Rabe are trying to say. But their methods are different. De Palma shows; Rabe tells...This is a portrait of hell so harrowing it’s impossible to shake.

Here’s a powerhouse of a documentary that makes you feel mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore.

Remember how the original John Wick snuck up and wowed us in 2014? Now he's back and better than ever. John Wick: Chapter 2 is the real deal in action-movie fireworks – it's pure cinema, an adrenaline rocket of image and sound that explodes on contact.

Looking for fun and a chance to scream bloody murder, then send for this terrific horror comedy in which Rachel McAdams crash lands on a desert island with her bullying boss (Dylan O’Brien) and decides to painfully alter his jerk DNA. Despite a divisive ending, I smell a hit.

No wonder Kenneth Branagh’s funny, touching and vital look at his own coming of age in Northern Ireland’s turbulent capital city is the Oscar frontrunner for Best Picture. No movie this year cuts a clearer, truer path of the heart. It’s his personal best.

Works enough miracles of 3-D animation to charm your socks off.

In a hotly divisive, post Jan. 6 election year, cinema virtuoso Alex Garland embeds us with journalists, led by a killer Kirsten Dunst, covering a speculative second war between the states. The bloody result is the most original,and propulsively exciting movie of the year so far.

Side Effects is Soderbergh in full, flinty vigor. It's anything but a formula murder mystery.

Unfortunately, it’s those same feelings that stick in the memory when López Estrada overdoes the melodrama and lets the plot fire off in too many directions. No worries. Diggs and Casal will keep you riveted.

A mesmerizing look at an asthmatic, rich-boy medical student in the act of discovering his insurgent spirit.

The Wolfpack is frustrating in how much it doesn't tell us about the Angulos and the legal tangle that comes with their release. But once you've met these kids, you won't forget them — or the film that puts a hypnotic and haunting spin on movie love.

This unnervingly funny and quietly devastating film -- director Todd Field's first since his smash 2001 debut with "In the Bedroom" -- pulls you in like a magnetic-force field.

The film's relentless pummeling grows wearying at 135 minutes. The first Terminator, a half-hour shorter, was leaner and meaner.

Scenes move from hurt to resigned laughter and ring poignantly true. The heroically unfashionable result is a minor but distinct pleasure.

Kudos to the Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony, for directing the hostilities for maximum impact and without neglecting character. Their thundering epic is also smart, snappy, politically savvy and blessedly fast on its feet.

You can feel the desperation of the filmmakers as they throw in fist fights, car chases, and, yes, more wig changes to give an illusion of momentum to a grab bag of botched ideas. No sale.

In Eastern Promises, shot to envelop by the great Peter Suschitzky, Cronenberg brings us face to face with the horror of self.

This stuff is golden. Directors Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein make sure the movie goes down like potato chips. It's great fun and compulsively watchable. And don't leave before Dustin Hoffman makes a hilarious appearance as the credits roll.

Delivers more suspense than a tombful of mummies.

Campbell Scott swings at one of the year's juiciest roles and knocks it out of the park.

I could have done more with the edgy humor of "Diner" and "Tin Men" and less of the mythmaking of "Avalon."

But Stone has found in Cruise the ideal actor to anchor the movie with simplicity and strength. Together they do more than show what happened to Kovic. Their fervent, consistently gripping film shows why it still urgently matters.

Though Macdonald offers the sight and sound of Whitney in interviews and home movies, she is never heard grappling with the grave issues the film raises.

What begins brightly gets bogged down over 140 minutes. A film that took off like a hare on speed ends like a winded tortoise.

Step up, cynics, and see the summer 2014 blockbuster that gets damn near everything right.

The late actor (Anton Yelchin) brings a sly wit and bruised conscience to the role that marks him again as a consummate actor and another reason that the feverishly hypnotic Thoroughbreds gets inside your head and stays there.

The sisters are doing it for themselves and one of them is a dragon in a wild, animated wonder ride from Disney that radiates female empowerment and comes at you in a whoosh of creative ideas in full eruption.

Don't obsess over the rough edges. The Lego Batman Movie rises on its own goofball spirits. Wanna get nuts and shake your sillies out? This is the place to do it.

Take a swig of this moonshine. There's magic in it.

The film is technically raw, but the sight of Van Peebles playing his father at a defining moment in movie history exerts a potent fascination.

Ignore the many problems in this violent revenge thriller and focus on the power and charisma of Denzel Washington who ends the third and final chapter in his Equalizer trilogy on a euphoric high. He’s a star, baby, and him you don’t want to miss.

Sweet is not how Schumer wants Trainwreck to go down. She wants to explode rom-com clichés and replace them with something fierce and ready to rumble. Done.

Unique and unforgettable.

The acid comedy of Grant's performance carries the film. It helps also that newcomer Hoult is that rare child actor who mercifully underplays the pathos of his role.

Without an ounce of phony Hollywood uplift, Winterbottom's film cuts right to the heart.

Kirby Dick's indispensable guerrilla attack on the film-ratings system gives Hollywood a swift, smart and hilarious kick in its institutional, hypocritical ass.

How do you make a movie about an intellectual argument? By putting a human face on it, which is what filmmaker Ava DuVernay and acting force Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor do in this stunning provocation about race and class. The result is something rare: a movie that matters.

Josh O’Connor adds another triumph to his growing list of exceptional performances as a Colorado father broken by divorce and a raging wildfire. Bring handkerchiefs

Bigelow’s triumphant return, after seven years, is essential cinema, without closure but not without hope. The house she has built for our attention is scary as hell, but in whatever remains of it, humanity still has a future.

Yes, this far-out fable is too much in every department. But it is also the work of a visual storyteller drunk on the power of movies to stir things up ... and maybe even to heal. It's a bumpy ride, for sure, but hold on. Okja is worth it.

McQuarrie — an Oscar winner for his script for 1995's "The Usual Suspects" — has an ace to play. That's the indie sensibility he brings to the usual Hollywood FX.

The animation is pretty, the songs are tuneful, and Josh Gad gets big laughs as Olaf, a snowman with a sun fetish. It's the holidays, people, work with it.

Visually, however, True History speaks volumes. In tandem with MacKay, whose incendiary performance finds method in Ned’s growing madness, Kurzel and his crew of merry, malicious pranksters blow the dust off a calcified outlaw history to bring something elemental and transgressive to the screen.

In no way does Owen's story claim to be a cure-all. Instead of false hope, it offers up possibility, the chance of a stimulus that might get past the blocks of developmental disorder. That's more than encouraging. Life, Animated is truly inspirational.

This sweetheart of a comedy boasts a hilarious and heartfelt performance by Keri Russell.

What raises the movie above the herd and rocks our settled ideas of pop entertainment is the way Hader and Wiig resist the script's pull to tidy things up.

This film geek's dream of a movie pulls the ground out from under you, but stays smartass to the end. Sweet.

In a summer of dumb, shameless drivel, Moore delivers a movie of robust mind and heart. You'll laugh till it hurts.

There's Theron, like a force of nature, compelling us to go beyond TV-movie supposition and look Wuornos straight in the eye. Her raw and riveting performance makes Monster an experience you won't forget.

Old master Eric Rohmer, 82, uses new tricks in the form of painted backdrops inserted digitally to create a virtual reality. Rohmer goes Lucas - who could have guessed?

Everything in this movie is so ripe and voluptuous that watching it doesn't seem enough, you want to take a bite out of it.

Cartwright, find something sadly timeless in a child torn apart in a custody battle that no one wins, least of all the child.

Getting creeped out has never seemed this totally cool.

A personal best for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a triumph for Scott and a war film of prodigious power. You will be shaken.

Both Sawyers and Sumpter are terrific, world-class charmers who suggest the powerhouses they're playing without undue mimickry.

There's no way to take your eyes off it.

The film, quite rightly, is a tour de force for Bardem.

Only some bumpy, arid passages in the script keep The Others out of the master class occupied by the likes of "The Sixth Sense" and, my favorite, 1961's "The Innocents."

Indefensible on a moral level, Rob Zombie's perversely watchable follow-up to his much-reviled cult hit "House of 1000 Corpses" is loaded with filmmaking energy.

It takes a while for this oddball film -- a mosaic of stories in the style of "Magnolia" -- to take hold, but when it does, it grabs you hard.

The problem for Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who also co-directed Beauty and the Beast, is turning a tale of violent love and death into a family film with a happy ending.

In this wildly ingen­ious chess game, grandmaster Nolan plants ideas in our heads that disturb and dazzle. The result is a knockout. But be warned: Inception dreams big. How cool is that?

Whitaker is on fire, and as long as he's onscreen, King keeps you riveted.

A love story about two pretty young cannibals won’t strike everyone as an appetizing dish. But you won’t be able to take your eyes off Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as they try to reconcile romance with killer impulses on a road trip through hell.

Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s dauntingly complex novel can sputter and flirt with incoherence, but the director and his actors, led by an all-in Timothée Chalamet, find the pow and the poetry in this cornucopia of visual astonishments.

It's a tall order that Tucci is not up to filling. But don't discount the pleasure of watching him try.

Darroussin is killer good and director Cedric Kahn turns Georges Simenon's seminal novel into a darkly comic spellbinder that pins you to your seat.

Forget Oscar, Ocean's Eleven is the coolest damned thing around.

An idol had fallen, and Gibney and the superb director of photography Maryse Alberti were there to capture the descent, including a confessional interview in which Armstrong blames the corruption of the game far more than himself. The movie rambles at two-plus hours, but the provocation never stops.

Michael Douglas digs deep and delivers one of his best performances in Wonder Boys -- a comic dazzler of roguish wit and touching gravity that is driven by characters, not jokes.

It's Morgan's core script, full of humor, heartache and verbal fireworks, that lifts Rush above the "Fast & Furious" herd.

The best social documents on film do more than show you what's wrong in the world – they make it personal. Bully does that with a passion.

Despite its fluid sexuality, The Half of It turns out to be less of a love story than a funny, touching and vital look into the nature of friendship.

Bana is magnificent in the role.

This is the firebrand Colette that Knightley plays with every fiber of her being. She’s something to see.

Clark is a talent to watch. He's made a transfixing film about a family that looks touchingly and unnervingly like yours and mine.

I didn’t have much hope for this umpteenth take on the 1980s comic-book relic about humanoid teen sewer rats, but Seth Rogen and his team of merry pranksters have turned this animated version into a giddy, goofball delight. Cowabunga, baby!

A gorgeously acted, written and directed spellbinder.

Some movies are too good to miss. Judy Berlin is one of them...It works like magic.

Get your titles straight -- this is the good one, and a roaring good time.

Eastwood hasn't had this much fun with a role in years, and his joy is contagious.

Lots of movies are labeled as "inspirational" – Hidden Figures truly earns the right to the term.

You want horror that screws with your head? This is your ticket.

Elegantly witty and haunting . . . McKellen gives the performance of his career . . . and Brendan Fraser excels.

Farmiga expertly guides a large and gifted ensemble cast and proves as fearless a director as she is an actress. She lights up Higher Ground and makes it funny, touching and vital.

Affleck and Hall make this unlikely love story palpably moving. And Renner (The Hurt Locker) is dynamite - he radiates ferocity and feeling.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints offers no glib answers or smooth resolution, but there's no question that Lowery is a filmmaker with a striking future.

In Darkness is an agonizing experience, especially when Jews are publicly humiliated in the streets and a driving rainstorm nearly drowns those cowering in the depths. Holland means to shake you. In Darkness has the power to haunt will haunt your dreams.

Cyrus, the summer's best, most original and crazily inventive comedy, is potently funny and painfully real.

The movie earns your attention and respect by digging deep, by finding the fear and self-doubt inside a man who'd never accept being defined as a hero. It's an eye-opener.

What the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly it explores the infinite in the smallest human details.

Bare and Miele do more than track a remarkable career here; they reveal the essentials of what makes Benson unique. Any paparazzo with moxie can get into the action and shoot first. But what this shutterbug's eye arranges, sometimes in a split second, is the work of a singular craftsman with a rare gift: raising the click of a camera shutter to the level of art.

There's no denying the exuberant energy and emotional force of this movie. It gets to you.

Working from a deft script by Delia Ephron, director Ken Kwapis labors hard so that guys won't cringe (too much) as four teen girls, of different body types, pass along the same pair of lucky jeans during a summer of love and loss.

There's a word for the kind of comic, dramatic, romantic, transporting visions Miyazaki achieves in Howl's: bliss.

Props to Kutcher for going to surprising, painful places. There's something haunted in his portrayal that hits hard and sticks.

Bell explodes onscreen in a performance that cuts to the heart without sham tearjerking. Look for Billy to blast off.

Leaves you feeling tense and terrific. It's fun to be fooled.

Before it runs off course into excess, this brilliantly acted film version of the 1999 novel by Andre Dubus III moves with a stabbing urgency.

The 'roo doesn't talk, except in a dream sequence…I'm dying here.

Dear White People marks an auspicious debut for writer-director Justin Simien, an African-American who laces his satire with delicious mirth and malice.

Evocatively shot by "Selma" wizard Bradford Young, A Most Violent Year reflects a world where nothing is held sacred. You watch with nerves clenched, holding on tight.

At 87 torturous, laugh-free minutes, the film could change the most avid cat fancier into a kitty hater.

All your friends will be talking about this femcentric raunchfest and its fabulous Asian-American actors who are ready to lace every laugh with human complication.

It’s the war between the bonds of family vs. the pull of wealth — a global theme across wide borders and cultures — that gives the film heft. But even when the script drifts into moralizing, it’s the emotions that hold sway.